Series 440 - Marie Reay anthropology collection

Identity area

Reference code

AU ANUA 440

Title

Marie Reay anthropology collection

Date(s)

  • 1940 - 2006 (Creation)

Level of description

Series

Extent and medium

1346 items and one box of stone implements

Context area

Name of creator

(1 Jul 1922 - 16 Sep 2004)

Biographical history

Marie Olive Reay was born in Maitland, New South Wales and began her career in anthropology at Sydney University, where she studied for an MA and undertook fieldwork in Indigenous communities in western New South Wales (Walgett, Bourke, Moree, Coonabarabran and others) in the 1940s. She later extended her fieldwork with Indigenous communities to Borroloola in the Northern Territory. From 1953, as a doctoral student supervised by WE Stanner in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology in the Research School of Pacific Studies at Australian National University, she began field research in the Wahgi Valley in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, with the Kuma. Reay's PhD thesis was published as The Kuma: Freedom and Conformity in the New Guinea Highlands in 1959, the same year she was appointed to a research fellowship in the Department of Anthropology, ANU. Working at ANU for the next 30 years and retiring in 1988, Reay died in Booragul, New South Wales on 16 September 2004.

Content and structure area

Scope and content

Research papers and notes on PNG elections, Kuma, Aboriginal Australians and gender relations; fieldwork notebooks, correspondence, draft manuscripts and completed MA thesis, sketches of kinship diagrams, reports and publications, financial records, newspaper clippings, photographs, maps, sound cassettes and reel tapes. Includes material from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS).

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Conditions of access and use area

Conditions governing access

Researchers must sign an access agreement

Conditions governing reproduction

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Finding aids

Allied materials area

Existence and location of originals

Existence and location of copies

Digital copies of photographs and slides are available at https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/240554

Related units of description

Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Studies: REAY_M01
Collected physical objects are held in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology collection, https://archanthcollections.anu.edu.au/

Related descriptions

Notes area

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Description identifier

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Rules and/or conventions used

Dates of creation revision deletion

Language(s)

  • English

Script(s)

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Accession area